My text consists of two major parts: first deals with the various theoretical and methodological issues as well as the possibilities of interdisciplinarity in literary historiography; and second comprises ’case studies’, which have been written on some questions of the history of XIXth century Hungarian literature.Literary scholars are usually categorized either as literary theorists or literary historians’ the two kinds of activity are connected with somewhat different standards, discourses and research attitudes. The whole of the dissertation deals far more with theoretical questions than works of literary history generally do, while it aims to consider these questions close to matter, within the context of historians’ practice.The studies of the first part deal with the questions and possibilities of the literary historiography from interdisciplinary point of view. They present an ”anthropological” literary historiographical practice that sets out from the anthropological initiatives of the interpretative anthropology of Clifford Geertz and the methodology of the ‘rhetorical turn’, and it regards the sociolinguistics or “the ethnography of speaking” as its own linguistics. The fourth paper intends to show what fundamental presuppositions, ways of fiction-making, metaphors, character models, determinants guide the works of literary history.The second part contains four case studies. The first analyses attempts to interpret some much-interpreted key concepts of the criticism of János Arany in a new way, and therefore it tries to put these concepts into a synchronic non-literal contexts (e.g. contexts of contemporary law, linguistics and politics). Second chapter – that interprets a text about tourism – attempts to connect rhetorical analysis and socio-historical contextualization, and exemplifying the linking of internalist and externalist ways of interpreting literary texts. Third deals with questions of the possible rhetorical patterns of a previously less-investigated genre, the memorial speech, and with possible connections between literary canonization and the canonization of certain behaviors and the assertion of certain moral standards. In fourth chapter by using the findings of Hungarian art history I try to put the mass of historically themed literary texts of the second half of XIXth century into a context that allows for an effective interpretation of these works, e.g., revealing their specific reading contract